That time of year

You may not realize it, but this has, until fairly recently and going back about a millenium, been the scariest season of the year for Jews. : So it’s understandable that a lot of my fellow Jews still have a visceral feeling about non-Jews’ attitudes towards Jews, and particularly those of Christians.

As I have written here before, this is by and large a mistake, especially considering that, as the “old” song goes, “We’ve got a bigger problem now.”
A few months ago I published a lengthy discourse, doomed to obscurity, in which in my somewhat pedantic way I tried to tutor my Dean’s World buddy, the often open-minded Aziz Poonawala, on what he should and should not be sensitive to–in his role as Islam’s ambassador to the rest of us, I suppose–in terms of what we Juice Jews consider a “blood libel.” : It came up in the context of Charles Johnson, Aziz himself and a tale he later regretted passing on that the Israelis were preparing biological weapons:

My point is this: Antisemitism is an important element of gentile anti-Zionism. They are not the same, but those who claim that they are unrelated are, well, antisemites, actually. And when Israel is accused of committing war crimes, or preparing to; and these war crimes are redolent of medieval accusations of well-poisoning as well as the classic blood libel, you can see a certain similarity: The Jews are claimed to be agents of not only mayhem but bearers of malefaction, poision, offal into the otherwise pure nature of things. This, then, is not such a nutty analogy.

Eight years ago this spring, at the height of the suicide bombings of Yasser Arafat’s terror war known as the second intifada, I started blogging about Jewish and Israeli issues. This, of course, brought out the anti-Israel crazies. I came up with a corollary to Godwin’s Law to describe these trolls: “In any internet discussion area concerning Israel, politics, or religion, the probability of anti-Semitic comments approaches one.” (In fact, I’ve seen comments threads that have absolutely nothing to do with Israel, politics, or religion: still devolve into anti-Semitism and Israel-bashing, but that’s a post for another time.)

And so, based on the thousands of comments and emails I’ve read over the years, both here and on other blogs and media sites, I present The Blogger’s Guide to Anti-Semitic Comments Trolls. Below are the some of the types of anti-Israel commenters I’ve identified over the years, but the list is by no means complete.